Some tips and lessons – for my first venture into moderating a panel at a con.

If you are at Wiscon, stop by the Panel at 10:00am on Saturday, on Blogging (and online journals, diaries etc), if you are reading this, and attending Wiscon, you’re probably interested in this topic. We’ll mention some of the technology stuff, but mostly I’m going to leave that for links on a handout (come by and get one) the more useful thing will be the discussion about how keeping a journal interacts with writing (and/or reading) and the other implications arising from it.

On the joys of your own businessor know I know why there are 24hr diners

I am at work.

This may not seem strange or anything, but note that I am writing this nearly at midnight on a Monday night.

This is both the joy and the sadness of owning your own business, you work these odd random late hours when you suddenly want to do something, such as what occupied me tonight, do serious finacial projections for the next year to see how you are doing and how you might do if you changed the scanrios somewhat.

So, here I am, having spent the evening staring at a spreadsheet manipulating little (and sometime big) numbers, all in an attempt to model what I would like my business to do 12 months from now.

The good news is that I think I did it, where “it” is figured out the model (someone else had written it, it is not simple but not overly complex either) and more importantly made it generally reflect the present (and hopefully future) reality of my business. If it is accurate I face about two perhaps three more fairly tough months, and after that may start to be doing pretty well. Not retire to a private island and go slighty mad well, but well enough that future goals such as attending next year’s WorldCon might suddenly seem realistic (and even without using up frequent flyer miles before the Airlines all go belly up).

But now my stomach wil thank me if I get myself to source of nurishment and eat something, and then take myself to bed. I can’t stay up too late tonight as tomorrow morning, at 9:00am the hot water in my building will be shut off for some repair work, meaning either I am up early and in fact get a shower, or I am not and I have a really cranky day (more so than a morning cup of coffee, I need my morning shower to face the day).

By the end of this week I may have as many as 5 possibly even more people than that who are out in the world selling my company’s software, which is both very cool and more than slightly scary! With that may come a whole realm of new challenges as well as a whole realm of new opportunities. It is beginning to look, going into my firm’s fourth year of existance, that we may soon become something, and though I will try to keep us small, I suspect we will not be as small as we are now this time next year – seems very likely that we will be bigger and far more complex.